Posts by Andre Alessi
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to recordari,
That being said, should we forgive people their indiscretions for some perception of a greater good?
I think the question here (which I honestly don't have a good answer for) is how much harm can you do in the course of doing good before the harm cancels out the good? Destiny certainly does help people in ways other groups do not, but quite frankly teaching them to be misogynist homophobes and xenophobes in the course of helping them with their other problems seems to me to be a poor deal at best.
Coincidentally, I've been reading a lot about The Doctrine of Double Effect recently, and I think that this is very much a case of asking how far you can go in excusing negative "side effects" (if that's how you want to see them.) The ideal (for me anyway, as an irreligious liberal) would be for secular public organisations to have the same kind of funding and remit for 24 hour, 7 days a week immediate response care and support that Destiny does. Deciding that that sort of support is "too expensive" and then farming it out to private organisations seems to me to be a failure in moral leadership first and foremost.
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to Sue,
what I’m wondering is does destiny church do anything more or better than existing agencies?
and do they have best practices in place and accountability?
Speaking from personal experience: it’s because a church like Destiny is allowed authority over a person’s private life that no secular organisation would ever be able to match. Imagine if WINZ or CYPFS started telling people what to do with their weekends-only the most rabid, un-self-aware talkback caller would ever back something like that. Yet, the members of Destiny are told, quite literally, how to live their lives by a man who thinks he’s specially annointed by an imaginary being.
My uncle is one of those people who has had his life turned around by Destiny. He spent time in jail for his part in an aggravated robbery as a teenager, but is now in a stable relationship with a woman and child, which by all accounts is happy and healthy. I wish he could have been supported better by government services so that he didn’t have to turn to a cult like Destiny to make this happen, but between the blowhard enemies of “social engineering” who seek to cut back on funding and the nutjobs like Garth McVicar who would quite happily see all post-release support de-funded in favour of more prison beatings, I can’t see how that will ever be the case.
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Muse: DIGITAL LINKY LOVE, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It's almost like there's a timewarp back to the more innocent days of 70's Eurotrash sexploitation when boobies were delightful shorthand for "we are so decadent".
I was pretty uncomfortable with the books' treatment of the Dothraki generally, so the casual nudity in their scenes was only part of my discomfort at seeing them on screen. I guess I was hoping for too much for fantasy tropes like that to be at least partially subverted by a visual reinterpretation.
One thing I will say about GoT on screen, though: Martin's work significantly benefits from abbreviation.
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Muse: DIGITAL LINKY LOVE, in reply to Tom Beard,
I thought that graphic sex acts were their own reason?
(With apologies to Ian Dalzeil):
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to ogle and scry.
Into the valley of Boobage
Viewed the six hundred... -
Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to Steve Parks,
Twitter is, admittedly, different and more public in that respect.
Not to teach anyone here how to suck eggs, but this is the nub of the issue. What "public" means has changed since the introduction of the Internet, and it's that bit that's rendered the law outdated.
Personally I don't think Facebook or Twitter or any website is more "public" than having a conversation with someone in a public place in the real world which we all agree is not (and should not be) threatened. The fact that people can perform simple searches for keywords of things you say on the Internet shouldn't render the act of typing and publishing the words themselves less free.
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to James Butler,
AFAIK the project fell through because SAP was completely unable to adapt from the “many components in -> few products out” model of machinery manufacture to the “few raw materials in -> many products out” model of paper and packaging.
I've used SAP in two different companies now. In the first, it was brilliant, useful and straightforward, in the second it was a massive pain in the butt that felt like it was ten years behind the times. Scrolling through materials and supplier categories alone was nightmarish because virtually every entry was outdated and everybody was using one of the 7 miscellaneous entries (which one you used was apparently related to the zodiac house Jupiter was passing through at the time.)
It's very much down to how well it's set up, and how well it's supported once it's set up, but neither of these things should cost that much.
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The true alliy of the political lie is "everybody knows that"-type conventional wisdom. Noone's going to vote for a politician who says that the sky is green because it is obviously false, but no politician ever did their electoral chances any harm by being tough on crime or promising to lower taxes.
There's the implication present that these are good things that will make our society and economy better, even though the evidence says the opposite.
(I think it's fair to take the "And this is where journalists come in by reporting actual studies on these things as context" argument as read at this point in the thread.)
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"Every Day is Sunday" reminds me strongly of this-Mika and Jackie Clark tackle Sam Sheppard's "Haere Mai, Everything is Ka Pai":
I had a flatmate (young pakeha guy from New Plymouth) who had a recording of an early version of this song and was _obssessed__ with it. He once came across a busker on Queen St who knew it and insisted that the two of them jam variations on the song for a good twenty minutes. I've always wondered who sang the version that he had-might it have been Rangi Parker? I can't seem to find a discography online.
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And now for something completely different: 25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Future (via Jamie Dubs.)
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Hard News: Friday Fever, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Have you seen the UK video for Dominion Road? It painfully looks like it was made in the mid '90s, and it's like someone was trying to style the Mutton Birds as a downunder Oasis :-(
I saw it but tried to forget it.
Some day I'd really like to put together a Youtube playlist of "music videos capturing iconic aspects of Auckland" because I'm nerdy like that. Like the Finn Brothers' Won't Give In:
If any place looks like it was designed to belong in a music video, it's the Britomart train station.